Over thinking, over analysing.

Month: July 2014

For those of you that remember a hard-rock/nu-metal band from earlier this century called Flaw, you are in for a treat in 2014! For those of you that remember Flaw from their soundtrack appearance on Vin Diesels XxX film and are secretly hoping for another XxX movie, this might be bit of a disappointment.

The main songwriter and vocalist for the band, Chris Volz remains one of my favourites to date. I am not sure why, as he is not in really line to eclipse vocalist-songwriters such as Tim Lambsis or even Serj Tankian on technical terms in my book.

Seeing as he does bring something special to the table, I find it interesting that I never really grew into his Five Bolt Main side project, nor did I really enjoy any of his solo stuff to any appreciable extent.

He was a really good fit with Flaw, especially with the original line up. And it turns out they are releasing an album, written and recorded by the original Flaw line up, some time in 2014!

On that note, I enjoyed their second album (Endangered Species – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bsjSaIDPig) more than I did the first, simply because I always felt they had only properly matured into their signature sound around this time. I think they had also replaced one guitarist by then, so I cannot account for the influence of the new guy on the sound second album, but an original line up is close enough, so I’ll be hoping this new release will be enough to warrant excitement.

Back to the original line up and their first album – Through The Eyes, this song is one of their lesser known-, but more radio-friendly, tracks with quite the display of Chris Voltz’s vocal ability. It is seriously pretty! (If this can be ever considered an apt description of a “metal” song)

There is one more song I think really never seemed to get the attention I always felt it deserved, it was a song called Amendment – Through the Eyes. This song has gone under appreciated in my personal experience, and probably has to be considered one of their most progressive. Try it out. It has distinct early 2000 nu-metal tinge to it, which can be expected since that was what was “trending” in metal in the days before “trending” was thing.

To end off this post which originally started merely to share an update of what these guys were up to, the have launched an Indigogo campaign to gather monetary support for the upcoming US tour in support of the new album. You can support them here. http://igg.me/at/Flaw/x And since I am too retarded to get this embedded in this here weblog I will give you the poor man solution – screenshot + link 🙂 By the way, there are 50 T-shirts up for grabs to those who contribute $35 or more.

Now there remains little else for me to do but stick to my two-Flaw-album-playlist for the rest of this Friday and get on top of this Otsu threshold algorithm for my contribution to the EBImage package (R), should the author be so kind as to accept my code contribution.

It is interesting how my morning routine has been refined to reflect my, what is developing as, a full fledged case of OCD.

Every morning I get into the office, I turn on my notebook and whilst it is getting warming up my brand new Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, I take a step out to sanitise the necessary components of my Russel Hobbs coffee percolator. I take care to fill up the water mark to just above “10 cups”. When done percolating a fresh brew, some water is lost in the system and the coffee mark sits agonizingly close to “10 cups”, but never exactly. I pour some coffee into my cup and I look forward, toward my vertically stacked screens.

By this time my earphones are on my head. I purposely left them charging the night before, to ensure that I get almost a full days uninterrupted play without having to plug it into the charger. Never over the weekend, for fear of damaging the battery! (http://www.parrot.com/zik/uk/)

Parrot Zik Wireless earphones

This morning was not different from any other, with the exception of music choice. I sat down, started my playlist, like every morning, with Amarok’s (Linux’s far superior version of Winamp) Theme song (Jingle) by allMeadow & Rob Costlow, called Art Of Nations. Here it is.

I take the 0:40 song on offer to make my choice as to the band and Album I am going to start my day with. It limits my time to make a decision, in order to avoid the over complicated process of optimizing a decision. Call it optimization by maximum likelihood if you will, as the decision is really based on an impulse.

This morning’s decision lead me to the Chevelle album called Sci-Fi Crimes. This albums tickles a host of my obsessions. It was recorded live in studio, with all the members playing together as a band. They employed very little trickery, other than standard, with vocal production, guitar production, drums etc. Now for those that don’t know, Pete Loeffler does both guitar and vocal duties in Chevelle, so most of what you are hearing when listening to this album, is a man, delivering his most honest rendition of the songs he has written.

Unlike previous albums, Sci-Fi Crimes was recorded live in the studio as a band, without the use of samples. “We wanted to do a record that was more true to what our live sound is like,” explains Sam Loeffler. “We wanted to go in the studio and play the tracks and just record them and not make a perfect record the way I think a lot of our records in the past have been made. We wanted to compete on that same level by not tuning the vocals and not tuning every single chord and not adding samples so every single snare hit is exactly the same. We just went in and recorded. It’s not a sonically perfect record; it’s more like you get if you go into a studio and just play. And I’m curious to see if people notice a difference.”

Curious if anyone noticed the difference. I like to think that I do. Particularly the the vocals. It is as though he reached a level of intensity with the vocal delivery that we are not ordinarily spoiled with. There is an added level of intensity that I’d like to imagine, that I get.

Try it out if you want here:

I have not listened to this album in some time, but this morning it really stood out as a win for my morning routine.